At the beginning of every engagement, I ask clients to describe their positioning. I start here because positioning informs every other business strategy—brand, marketing, customer acquisition, even hiring. But what’s striking is this: the more successful a business becomes, especially over a long period of time, the harder it often is for leaders to define.

Leaders often have a vague sense—“We help companies win”—but lack the specificity that makes positioning meaningful. On paper, they look indistinguishable from competitors.

Why? Because for successful companies, there’s little incentive to do the hard work. True positioning forces you to ask who you serve, why, and whether past assumptions still hold.

Put under a microscope, positioning reveals what’s healthy and what’s not—what drives growth and what quietly holds it back. And if everything looks “fine,” it raises the tougher question: fine compared to what, and for how long?

So why revisit positioning when it seems to be working? The answer is simple: validation. It either confirms your current path or validates the change you probably already know you need to make.

Vertical or Horizontal?

If you think about business strategy as a concentric circle, then the middle of that circle is a business’s purpose and the first ring is a business’s positioning.

The purpose is the reason why the business exists. It’s often internal-facing and aspirational in nature. (For example, “Turner exists to make a difference in the lives of our people, customers, and community.”)

Positioning, however, is much more concrete and defines what your business does and for whom it does it. In effect, it’s your “discipline for market.”

In a perfect world,  positioning work would always come in the infant stages of a business, because it allows for ideas and decisions to be rooted in the rich and fertile ground of strategy.

But the way that it works for many businesses is that positioning comes much later in the organization’s life cycle, because so much of a business’s early success is defined by saying “yes” as much and as often as possible, to almost any and all work, that positioning can feel like a limitation, or even a luxury.

Paradoxically, it’s almost as if the price of admission to solid positioning is a number of years of, well, no positioning at all. (Which is also a type of positioning, of course.)

A lot of the thinking about positioning that I’ve done recently has been fueled by the work of David C. Baker, who wrote a compelling and nuanced book called The Business of Expertise. In it, he defines both vertical and horizontal positioning, and argues the benefits of both.

Many businesses, he posits, begin with vertical positioning, because it’s the easiest to understand: you only work for clients in a particular vertical. Vertical positioning allows you to group and organize your clients in a way that makes them easy to find—and easier to market to.

Philip Morgan, author of the Positioning Manual for Indie Consultants, goes a step further and talks about pure market verticals, which can be either very broad or very narrow.

Compare the 1,034 companies in the U.S. that work in the narrow market vertical of “crushed and broken limestone mining and quarrying” to a broad market vertical like “retail” or “finance.”

On the other hand, horizontal positioning defines your target market across a number of verticals.

Perhaps you work in lots of industries, but only one geographic location, or only with companies that meet a certain revenue threshold. Those are both demographic segmentation factors that can help you figure out to whom you’re providing what, and why.

Baker’s podcast co-host and co-expert on positioning, Blair Enns, sums it up like this: “Vertical is the market, horizontal is the demographic or discipline.”

In short, your position.

The Difference Maker

What I find most interesting about positioning is that, like your brand narrative, it exists whether you acknowledge it or not. The market already has an impression of you—price leader, technical expert, responsive partner, premium option. The question is whether you’re shaping that perception or letting others define it for you.

Positioning is your North Star. It guides who you serve, where you invest, and even the talent you need to hire. Without it, you can still move forward, but the path is harder, slower, and less certain.

As strategist Tim Williams notes, “A strategy that doesn’t leave anything out cannot be called a strategy.” Positioning requires thoughtful restraint. Yes, it carries risk. But the greater risk is refusing to take a stand at all.

Do the work, and positioning becomes the advantage that puts you in the best position to win.